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Walmart (yes, that Walmart), is launching a new open source DevOps platform for cloud and application lifecycle management. OneOps, which was developed by Walmart Labs, is meant to help developers write and launch their apps faster and make maintaining them easier.

The company first announced its plans to open source the service last year.

“Our mission is to give our customers the most agile, cost-effective, flexible application lifecycle management solution for enterprise-class workloads in the cloud,” the team says.

While Walmart may seem like an odd company to launch a tool like this, there can be little doubt that few other legacy retailers have used technology to their advantage to the degree that Walmart has. As the company notes today, though, it’s a cloud user and not a cloud provider.

“It makes sense for Walmart to release OneOps as an open source project so that the community can improve or build ways for it to adapt to existing technology,” Walmart CTO Jeremy King and WalmartLabs VP of Platforms Tim Kimmet write in today’s announcement. “We are no stranger to open source. We’ve been an active contributor, releasing technologies such as Mupd8 and hapi with the community.”

OneOps was actually founded in 2011 and Walmart acquired it in 2013. Today, about 3,000 engineers within the company use it to build and manage new products. Its e-commerce sites like walmart.com and Sam’s Club are managed through OneOps. The company says its engineers use the platform to commit over 30,000 changes per month.

So what can OneOps actually do? According to Walmart, one of the key benefits of the platform is that it works with multiple public and private cloud platforms out of the box. These include Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, AWS and CenturyLink Cloud, as well as any OpenStack cloud (Walmart was an early adopter of OpenStack and is still one of its largest users).

“Greater control of cloud environment means that instead of cloud providers dictating what proprietary tools and technologies we have to use, or how much bandwidth we can have, OneOps puts the control back into the hands of developers,” the team writes today.

The team says it also worked with the NoSQL database company Couchbase to integrate its product into its stack. OneOps is also set up to work with technologies like Node.js, Docker, ElasticSearch and many others.

Other features of OneOps include monitoring tools, auto-healing and -replace when things go wrong, and auto-scaling tools to manage the size of a given cluster. For admins, the platform also offers integration with enterprise identity services, quota management, as well as a configuration management system.

The code for the project is now available on GitHub. “Walmart continues to make important contributions to open source and we’re looking forward to seeing how the GitHub community engages with OneOps,” GitHub VP of Product Management Kakul Srivastava said. “It’s great to see a retail giant also become a software giant.”

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Crunchbase

OverviewWalmart is a multinational retail corporation that operates several chains of discount department and warehouse stores.
The company’s segments include Walmart U.S., Walmart International, and Sam’s Club. The Walmart U.S. segment is a mass merchandiser of consumer products operating under the Walmart or Wal-Mart brands as well as walmart.com. It also offers digital services such as Vudu and InstaWatch. …

OverviewWalmartLabs is accelerating their development to redefine the shopping experience to meet the changing needs of our customers wherever they are —in a store, on our website, or on their mobile device.